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DO YOU: Building Youth Resilience Through Creative Expression is a primary prevention strategy to address teen dating violence, sexual harassment, and bullying by promoting positive youth development and healthy relationships. This training is designed for adult facilitators and teen mentors (who are peer facilitators) interested in implementing DO YOU in their communities. This comprehensive training will equip you with all materials and experience necessary to successfully implement the 10-session DO YOU program locally with small groups of teens ages 13-16. In order to attend this training, participants must have been through a SV/IPV prevention training (i.e., Principles of Primary Prevention or an equivalent).

Reproductive Justice is an intersectional framework that understands reproductive health in a full and holistic way. In this training, participants will increase their understanding of this framework and explore the ways that joyful sexuality can connect to prevention and building holistic services for survivors of sexual violence.

Primary prevention programs are focused on reducing or eliminating the first-time perpetration of sexual violence and intimate partner violence (SV/IPV). This means figuring out what factors make some people more at-risk to perpetrate SV/IPV, and changing or interrupting those factors. This training delves into the key concepts underlying this innovative work, highlights promising practices from the field, and includes an overview of Virginia’s Guidelines for the Primary Prevention of Sexual Violence & Intimate Partner Violence used by sexual and domestic violence agencies throughout Virginia and across the country.

Recognizing that all forms of oppression are interconnected, we know that in order to end sexual and domestic violence, we must also work to end racism. This training will examine how institutional and systemic racism create disparities in experiences between survivors of color and survivors who are white (including disparities in access to resources and support following trauma exposure) and why a racial justice lens is integral to trauma-informed advocacy and prevention. Participants will be given specific examples of how the Virginia Sexual and Domestic Violence Action Alliance has integrated a racial justice lens into aspects of its work to take back to their agencies.

The vast majority of youth referred from school to law enforcement and into the juvenile justice system are survivors of trauma. The justice system typically fails to address, and often deepens, trauma. This 6-hour training will address the connections between trauma and system-involved youth, and will provide participants with a brief “training in a box” to take back to deliver to their local schools and task forces to start conversations about simple steps that schools can take to significantly reduce the number of youth referred to law enforcement by responding to students in more trauma-informed ways.

As the presence of technology increases in our personal and professional lives, advocates and other professionals working with survivors of sexual and intimate partner violence (SV/IPV) benefit from learning to analyze both the risks and benefits of its use. In addition to exploring how technology-based abuse impacts survivors, participants will identify ways they can support survivors in navigating tech systems safely, review best practices in tech safety for organizations, and prepare to integrate tech considerations in their organizations’ daily work. Participants should have a basic understanding of SV/IPV prior to attending this training.

One of the main tenets of trauma-informed advocacy involves respecting and honoring cultural and historical issues. This training is meant to give an overview of how to provide a trauma-informed response to survivors in the African American Community. Participants will look at some of the historical and current barriers to services and ways to implement culturally responsive practices into services and advocacy.

Sexual and domestic violence agencies across the state are using VAdata to track services and manage their grant reporting. For new staff, this means learning about VAdata, how data is captured, and how to use data to tell the story of survivors in your area. For advanced users, the training aims to provide participants with information about the many reports available in VAdata and hands on experience inputting data. After these trainings, participants will understand more about the history and scope of the VAdata system, how to use and audit queries to retrieve information, how to use reports in grant writing, raising community awareness and more, and how data entry practices impact data and reporting statewide.